Wednesday, January 30, 2013

What Would Yaro Do? Twitter edition

I generally don't pay any attention to Twitter. Why? Because it's called "Twitter". Anything that openly traffics in "tweets" cries out to be ignored. But the recent post and comments sent me over to check out the College Misery Twitter feed. And maybe I'm over-reacting here, but our Twitter feed seems to directly mock
specific, publicly recognizable, individual
students.

Smackdown: sure, it's what we do. But through it all, we have always anonymized the target along with ourselves. A while back, a member was outed, and their Dean 'asked' them to leave
CM. If my own Dean were to identify me, I think I would be willing to stand behind what I've posted here.
There is much to snark at in academia. There is much to criticize, to
mock, to rail at, to abhor and to call down heaven's wrath upon. From Absentee Abigail, through Bookless Bob, Clueless Clementine and on through the alphabet, we snark away, but not at the individual. Always we mock the absenteeism, rail at the booklessness and abhor the lack-of-clue. I will call out the admins, the taxpayer, and the business community alongside the absentee student, but I try not to dump on individuals.

I don't know. Is there really a big difference between on one of Cal's Vidshizzles and retweeting a foolish student tweet? Somehow the mockery just seems more direct, more personal, more, I don't know, mean.

I don't often invoke Yaro either. (I love the guy, but I think the
reverence for him jumped the shark back when CM put his avatar on
pajamas - just sayin). But he came to mind as I read 'our' twitter feed,
because I can't shake the feeling this was something he wouldn't do.

Glenn, are you seriously talking about Twitter? It is a totally public and open site. If you tweet, you tweet to EVERYBODY, not to a private group of friends and families. Stick to Facebook with decent privacy settings if you want your social media entries to remain private to an extent of your choosing. You're embarrassing yourself on failing to understand that Twitter is, ultimately, a "Hey whole world! Here's what I've got to say, in 140 characters or less!" If you're on twitter and tweeting asinine things, be prepared for anyone anywhere in the world to mock you.

To me, the Twitter feed seems like a fun way to potentially draw student eyes to the site and remind them that their proffies are humans with thoughts, feelings and lives. I thought there was a tone of at best gentle mockery which is sometimes directed at the student, but sometimes at the miserable lives of proffies.

A major distinction might be that many of the interactions described on the blog take place in settings with a reasonable expectation of privacy on the part of the student. Vidshizzles and Twitter are the opposite of that.

I'm anti-twitter because twitter and facebook have this creepy way of figuring out who you are even when you are working with pseudonyms. I would hate to get outed, so I stay off the Twitbit entirely and only use FB under a fake name, opened only an another browser.

I don't tweet but it seems to me that if idiotic students make buffoons of themselves in public, that sharing those messages with the 150 followers - who have chosen to follow CollegeMisery - is not such a bad thing.

Are you referring to the compilation of posts where students publicly wrote that they cheated on exams or were happy that class got out 45 minutes early or were judging the sexiness of their professors? I don't see anything on the CM twitter feed.

My take is similar to Hiram's. If someone's foolish enough to post on a public forum using his or her own photo and name that they cheated, etc., then it's open hunting season. It's not like we're the ones outing them. They're outing themselves by posting stupid shit on twitter. I mean, come ON! Bragging about cheating in such a public forum is just dumb.

If you're talking about something else that was on our own twitter feed that I missed, then disregard my opinion above.

If you broadcast to the entire universe that you're an idiot, the universe usually will not argue with you.

But I have to say I think it's a colossally bad idea to draw student attention to this blog. A colossally bad idea. I think it's obvious as to why. If CM-ers want to troll through student Twitter feeds I don't begrudge them that (and I'd probably enjoy seeing the fruits of their labors, especially since I don't go anywhere near Twitter), but I think it would be better if the CM name was kept out of it.

There was a hooha about mocking teens who said racist things on twitter a couple of months ago after the re-election of Obama. The argument went: they are young and stupid, and their racism should follow them for the rest of their lives. Personally, I think if you are going to put your real name on a platform that allows pseudonyms, and then say stupid shit, people should be allowed to laugh at you.

HOWEVER, do we want students trolling us here and whining about how unfairs we are? No. We had that annoying undergrad troll for a while, and he was hella irritating.

I posted pieces from the blog, some of the linked articles, and retweeted spectacularly dumb tweets from students I found elsewhere on Twitter. Occasionally I engaged in conversation with some students who were breaking world records for stupidity.

I spent an hour or two a day on this, and thought it might be an extra avenue of entertainment for the very few people who followed the feed. (At most, I had 158 followers, which if you've never been on Twitter, is nothing.)

If it's somehow not something readers of the blog want the CollegeMisery brand on, which is the feeling I get from comments here and the emails forwarded to me by Les, then I'll just let it go.

I took down about 600 tweets earlier this evening. Sorry, Les. If you want to do something else with it, please feel free.

I'm sort of stunned at this actually. Terry ran this blog for a while, as most of you know, and has written some brilliant pieces for it.

Working on the blog in any fashion is a pretty decent sacrifice of time, and I'm grateful he did it. I nabbed some of the old tweets from Leslie, and yeah, he mocked the students, but these are ridiculously stupid students, saying the kinds of things that mark them as just the kinds of students that ruin this profession.

If they're not mockable, on things they posted - sometimes under their own name, but usually something like @NeekolasCageJr. or @SassyProblems - then I don't know why we have the fucking page at all.

I thought the CM twitter feed was awesome. There were some hilarious things posted by Terry. I myself don't see the harm in what Terry was up to with the CM feed, as it is a totally public forum, and if you're going to put out statements under your own name that are worth mocking, prepare to be mocked, or as my favourite student uni paper used to always state "if you can't take a joke, don't be one." I'm surprised at the number of "grownups" here making the same mistake as the youngin's in forgetting that Twitter is a totally public way to announce to the entire world that you're an idiot if you post idiotic things.

I truly don't want to piss on anyone's party, but who can be upset that the Tweeter guy retweeted idiotic things students said under their own Tweeter user names? It's not a private forum over there, right?

And if you didn't like it, how is the fact that it's "our" Twitter feed reflect anything on our pseudonymous selves?

Jesus Murphy choking on a cracker.

We're not all Yaro, so what he would do is a sentimental but irrelevant thought.

I am so pissed off at this. Leslie, what happened and what can we do about it? I mean it's your blog. If the Twitter-domo is okay with you, then it HAS to be okay with the blog. People who don't like it have the same option as always. Check Katie. I'm sure she's got something cooking over there in Kalamazoo.

I haven't been following the twitter feed (sorry, Terry), but I did wonder, when the first CM post composed of "sexy professor" tweets appeared, whether reposting stupid student tweets on the blog is quite fair to the authors, since, at least as I (quite possibly inaccurately) understand it, tweets are somewhat ephemeral, if only by their sheer volume, and because they can, in fact, be "taken down." It seemed that by reposting them to CM, we might making them more permanent. On the one hand, I absolutely agree that students are adults, and that if they decide to post stupid stuff to the internet, they need to live with the consequences. On the other hand, I can think of a couple of personal communications of my own from my twenties and even thirties (each of them sent to a single person via ink on paper, so considerably different in some ways) that I'd rather not see resurface in a public venue. Mind you, I write the very few tweets I write with the assumption that they're both permanent and public (and assume that anything sent from my university email address might also become public), but I'm old and cautious.

On the other hand, I was only half-kidding when I suggested that someone should track down the students who boasted of cheating on twitter, and report them to their colleges and/or parents (assuming some of them have parents who would care). I feel no pause whatsoever about their tweets being immortalized, publicized, retweeted, etc., etc. And I could understand if someone else felt the same way about some of the creepily sexist comments under the "sexy prof" thread, or even the meanness/objectification reflected in the fashion comments. While people may get smarter about blurting out what they're thinking via various means as they age, I'm not as sure that underlying character/attitudes change, and I can think of some pretty good arguments against hiring someone who spent hir college career mocking hir professor's clothes.

So I guess I've thought a bit about questions that are at least related to the ones R &/or G raises, and might advocate taking down the posts with the simply stupid tweets once we've had our fun with them (especially if the names are indexable/searchable; I'm not sure whether they are, since they're in images), but I don't have tremendously strong feelings about the matter -- except to suggest that we leave the cheaters up.

I also suspect that it's wisest to keep the door to the faculty lounge closed (i.e. not directly or indirectly invite students to CM). If some of them listen at the keyhole, or under the window, or crawl through the heating vents and do a bit of eavesdropping, so be it. They might, indeed, learn something.

I also meant to say in the second-to-last paragraph above that I realize other people would draw the line in other places, and I'm comfortable with that. I hold myself responsible for what I post under my own pseudonym here, but not for what others post here, or elsewhere under the CM name. In a group blog with room for 100 authors, it's highly unlikely that each author is going to agree with everything that every other author posts. If I became uncomfortable with the average or overall tone of the blog, I'd stop writing here, but that tone is created by the interplay of diverse voices, and I don't expect to agree with all of them all the time.

This is complicated due in part to issues of privacy (ours and the students'), what this blog is all about and I'm not entirely sure how Twitter works.

It's fun to find stupid students and mock them anywhere - here, Twitter, the bar, faculty meeting... However, I don't necessarily like berating individual students. We can't do that on the blog because it would identify the CM poster. On Twitter, we can because the students put there names out there. That seems a little too mean to me. Maybe not for somebody else and I'm not criticizing Terry P for doing it. I'm sure it's fun, just not my style.

I could have less of a problem with retweeting or responding to a student's tweet who is using a pseudonym. There's less of an appearance of picking on a real person. Getting into a Twitter war with a student seems kind of childish (far more mature to insult them on your own blog, I guess) and other people may not understand what we are doing here. In order for our Twitter feed to attract new readers, it should reflect how we do things on this blog.

SfS and WL are correct. I don't think we want students to come here. Not that they would be able to out anybody. They would just be a pain in the ass. Part of the fun of CM is that I can berate students without any pushback. There's been some notable cases when CM members get into fights but that's the exception. We hold together pretty tight here. That's what makes it a community.

I've seriously thought about getting a twitter feed for Beaker Ben. I would use it as a microblog. Lots of little things seemingly happen every day that I could tweet. They are small annoyances that even in total don't even amount to a good CM post They might play better on a smaller stage like Twitter. It would still be anonymous and not directed at other individual Twitter users. Frankly, I just don't have the time to get into it.

I often send in facebook posts from my facebook "friends." I just copy and paste them without names/pictures into a document that I ask CM to post. I also made sure that you can't google their status to find out who they are. I think what they post is funny and sometimes sad, but I want to protect their identity and I want to protect my own identity too. So, maybe just do the same. Or, blur the username.

While Twitter is indeed a public forum--far more so than Facebook, despite privacy settings that are about as solid as Swiss cheese--I see Cassandra's point about making those tweets more lasting by reposting them as-is. So I think Atua's right to suggest that we blur usernames and even photos in future posts.

But I love me some CM Tweet harvests. It certainly does point out the misery to anyone who doesn't bother to read or believe what we proffies are posting. A further bonus: the back-and-forth banter on Twitter itself could very well provide those valuable "teachable moments" that we are supposed to be finding in our profession. EVERYONE WINS!

We're going to choose to take the higher ground on that? That's what we're going to spend our capital on. Okay, we're not going to repost something public a student said to 150 other people because...uh, well I don't understand the because.

Just to be clear, I asked for a discussion. I did NOT ask that the twitter feed be taken down. I wanted to take the community's pulse as I put it. And I accept that most of you are less worried about this than I am.

I'm fine to retweet to your heart's content. What bothered me is some of the tweets from CM (ie from us). Since the twitter feed got taken down, it's hard to point to what concerned me, but the example posted here boiled down to us saying:

@specific individual: Your professor wishes he was dead.

which arguably violates our own Rules of Misery (if we said it to each other).

Strelnikov is absolutely right: The enemy is Stupidity. So my point is that I prefer to attack the stupidity, rather than the individual, even when the individual is being stupid. I think CM would be playing with fire to engage in Twitter debates with individual students.

which arguably violates our own Rules of Misery (if we said it to each other)

How? I may be dense this morning, but I don't see what's wrong with this. Student tweeted something revealing great stupidity, and then the domo said what I often think when confronted with my own students.

I am so amazed at all of this. The Twitter feed felt to me exactly like what this whole website is about. Are we not interested in "saying it's little when it's little"?

I am not a big Twitter user, but I thought what I saw was hilarious. The gimmick of Terry responding directly to students as if he was their professor led to some really funny conversations, many of which the students themselves "favorited." They got it! Saying "Welcome to the Dean's List" to a kid who's just tweeted "I'd rather fill up my pants with poop than go to another stupid English class," is a funny and potentially instructive thing.

And if the feed only had 150 followers, it's not as if any of us were being too badly abused by something many of us think of as "our blog."

But the truth is, Leslie, it's up to you. I hate that Terry took the "offensive" tweets down. That's silly. But I understand it if he feels a little like he did all that work for nothing.

And, as for the complaint that a reader doesn't like Twitter. So? Don't tweet. And don't begrudge that avenue for people on the site who want to use it. There's a kind of odd thing going on here. Some readers seem to be embarrassed about being associated with the College Miseery Twitter feed. I'm often embarrassed at Strelly's plans to murder students. Do you think someone looking in from the outside would see the humor in THAT?

Re-tweeting stupid/silly tweets is one thing, but I thought the "hey kid, your prof wishes he was dead!" was a bit overboard. I'll tell my department mates "hey, Sally Jones is in my 201 class. Guess what she said today! What an idiot!" but in class when Ms. Jones made her stupid comment I was a bit more gentle---"well actually Ms. Jones, if you look at x, you'll see that..." There's a difference between venting and correcting. Teachers shouldn't vent directly at students (except in extraordinary circumstances I suppose). That's why we're all here together, because venting can be healthy but we should do it amongst our peers.

I don't know how to say this other than, "So what?" It's overboard? So don't read the Twitter feed.

And this example about "your professor wishes he were dead," I get it. How anyone thinks that reflects poorly on this blog or the Tweetie-Domo or whatever. Shit!

And does anyone get that these students that the Twitter feed engaged with WEREN'T ACTUALLY COLLEGEMISERY'S STUDENTS! We actually don't have any students. We're an anonymous blog. Most student Twitter accounts I see are sort of pseudonyms anyway, like @sexy_sophomore.

For folks who were having fun with the feed, this seems like a pretty harsh penalty.

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What Is This?

College Misery is a dysfunctional group blog where professors get the chance to release some of the frustration that builds up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.